From a Women's Jail, Anthology of Lives

By CAROLYN BATTISTA

Published: February 1, 2003

Nineteen women listened closely in a classroom at the York Correctional Institution in Niantic, Conn., on a recent afternoon as Wally Lamb read aloud, not from one of his best-selling novels, but from a terse account that one of the women had written about her first day in prison. Her bare-bones sentences recorded lockups after meals, a bathroom with no privacy and a room crowded with warring roommates.

The second he finished, one woman after another jumped in, advising the writer on how she might flesh out her spare account: let people hear those horrible, clanking sounds of the lockup; let them smell the meals; ''Show every little thing!''; ''I want to hear some dialogue!''

''S-l-o-w down -- fiddle with 'Show, not tell,' '' Mr. Lamb advised the writer, who had asked him to read the piece in her place. She nodded. She would do some rewriting for the next session of the writing group that Mr. Lamb leads here.

Mr. Lamb taught high school English for years before he impressed Oprah Winfrey, among others, with his wry, redemptive novels ''She's Come Undone'' and ''I Know This Much Is True.'' The author is still very much the good teacher, steady, encouraging and funny. Week by week, draft by draft, he leads his students as they turn to writing as a way to make sense of their lives and go forward.

The women -- usually about 20 -- gather around tables in their prison-issue maroon shirts and pants with gray sweat shirts. York, as the state's only prison for women, has inmates convicted of a range of crimes, including homicide, theft and assault; the makeup of the writing group is across the board.

Its members have written gut-tearing tales of being battered by life -- being molested, beaten, cheated, raped. On this day, however, the stories they shared were mostly poignant. One woman wrote of the death of a beloved elderly neighbor. Another described how the prison's cluster of buildings looks at night: ''After dark, it looks like any small town, like a peaceful community. I pretend I'm walking down a country road, leisurely and free.''

Out of the group's efforts has come a compilation of work by 10 participants, ''Couldn't Keep It to Myself: Testimonies From Our Imprisoned Sisters,'' published this week by Regan Books, an imprint of HarperCollins. Mr. Lamb wrote the introduction.

The workshop writers, Mr. Lamb noted, generally want to look back, at their childhoods and what he calls ''the long arc of their lives'' to try to understand themselves. The contributors rarely wrote of their crimes, he said, and when they did, ''it was never to exonerate themselves or to whitewash their actions.'' When they addressed the crimes, he continued, it was ''usually with shame, remorse and profound guilt.''

As he prepared the book for publication, he added, he educated himself about the ''Son of Sam'' statutes that prohibit people from profiting from writing about their crimes, except in incidental references. Then, he said, he ''edited accordingly,'' although he needed to deal with only ''a sentence here and there, a paragraph or two at most.''

Together, the women chose the book's title from a line in a gospel song.

Mr. Lamb first came to York in August 1999, to give a talk as a favor to a friend on the staff. Women attended it mainly, he figured, to see ''that guy who was on Oprah.'' Indeed, they asked what she was like. But after he did some writing exercises with them, one woman simply asked, ''You coming back?''

He has come back ever since, leading his workshop on alternate Thursdays with Dale Griffith, a teacher at the prison school. Ms. Griffith, who also wrote a piece for the book, graduated from college in her 40's, as a divorced mother raising three children. Her operating principle is, she said, ''The process of writing is like the process of life.'' An early draft may not be so good, but it gets better.

Every fall, Mr. Lamb and Ms. Griffith send out fliers inviting inmates to join the class. Some do, but drop out; others stay from year to year.

At first Mr. Lamb, who favors jeans and well-worn sneakers, was not at all sure he could create an atmosphere of openness and trust in prison. But in an early session, Diane Bartholomew -- a quiet woman in her mid-50's, a mother of four who had been employed in a candy factory in Naugatuck, Conn., for 22 years -- raised her hand to read a short piece about her life.

She read about a father who beat her when she was a child and forced himself on her for sex when she was a teenager; about the husband whom she killed, in a frantic moment after what she described as years of abuse; and about her battles with depression and cancer in prison.

''Something unlocked in her,'' recalled Robin Cullen, a former inmate who runs her own painting company and who contributed to the book. That opened the gate for others. ''We were given a safe place to find our voices,'' Ms. Cullen remembered. The process helped Ms. Cullen grieve; she was serving time for a drunk-driving accident in which her passenger, a friend, was killed. The book is dedicated to Ms. Bartholomew, who died of breast cancer in November 2001.

Nancy Whitely, who is working in a deli and hopes to return to college after serving time for credit card fraud, has two pieces in the book. ''Jail makes you feel like a loser,'' she said. ''This was something I could do right. The writing gave me a chance to examine how I got to the place where I was, put things in order, think what about myself needs fixing. I'm grateful.''

Along the way, the writers acquired a nickname: the Lambettes. And as Tabatha Rowley, another contributor, recalled, the camaraderie the name implies made the women comfortable enough to speak the unvarnished truth. ''We had Mr. Wally red in the face sometimes,'' she said.

As the book reaches the stores, the women have asked that some of the proceeds go to Interval House, a Hartford organization that provides services for battered women and their children. Connecticut has legislation that may attach cost-of-incarceration charges to any money the women could receive themselves.

Mr. Lamb, who is working on his third novel, will continue to meet with them. ''They write their hearts out,'' he said. ''They rewrite, revise. When they're done, you can see in their eyes that they know something valuable that they hadn't known before.''

Photos: Wally Lamb teaching his writing class in a women's prison. (C. M. Glover for The New York Times)(pg. B9); Wally Lamb's writing class at York women's prison in Connecticut has been running since 1999. The group has just published a book. (C. M. Glover for The New York Times)(pg. B19)